The results of the LinuxQuestions.org 2005 awards were published earlier this week and KDE once again won the Desktop Environment of the Year award. The distance between KDE and the other desktop environments increased over last year while no less than 3 KDE applications won in their own categories. The LinuxQuestions.org visitors thought that Quanta, the homemade feature rich web development application, is the best Free Software application available for web design. The extragear music player amaroK, which helps you rediscover your music, finally took over reign within the multimedia category. Last but not least KDE's most used application, the pumping heart of the desktop environment, Konqueror, received an award as best file manager.

But that's not all, various applications also received mostly close second places. The code development application KDevelop, which is used by most KDE authors, got a supremely close 0.61% less votes than the winner Eclipse. Kate, the text editor of choice for KDE users, also got a solid 2nd place in the editors category, and is probably the only one within the top 3 also usable by non-geeks. Coming close behind the cross-platform competition was KOffice in the Office Suite category, Konqueror for web browsers, KMail for e-mail clients and Kopete, the Instant Messenger of KDE, narrowed its position compared to last year. Finally the application that everyone is using, but noone knows it exists, KWin, our mighty window manager, received a second place as well.

KDE and its applications are still improving so expect increased ratings next year, when LinuxQuestions.org again asks "Who rules the Linux world?".

Comments

A heartfelt thanks to all developers, testers and users of Quanta Plus for garnering our third consecutive win as best web development tool from linuxquestions.org. This is truly a well conducted user poll and it's not at all easy to pull off a win there. This has also been good to promote Quanta and KDE to a lot of users who for whatever reason may not be familiar with us. Finally huge thanks to all KDE developers who have made the worlds best development platform. Without the advantages of KDE we would still be in the starting blocks pulling our hair out. Andras and I have a lot of hair, so let's not think about that. ;-) Oh, and a special note of appreciation to Andras for being the most awesome guy I know.

Yeah, thanks for putting us in the bag for 2006, but we have to wait a year to win that. 2007 will be sweeter because that will the one that reflects a substantial KDE 4 useage with new tools and rewritten VPL.

Hi,
First Of all thank KDE for this great Desktop. The Only reason I could encourage people to use Linux/Open source was because of all the free killer Apps like Amarok and others.
I also like Konqueror but the Name is too much.
I am German and in German the pronunciation is... (cant realy describe it horrible I guess). I also believe that in English it isnt fun to say "Konqueror" either. Are here any French people who can tell me if the Name sounds good being a native French speaker? I know of the story behind the meaning of the Name but it is too geekish nowadays. Wouldnt it be nice to get a flasher, snappyer Name for 4 which is nicer to write and pronounce in more Languages? At least the main Languages English, German, and French.
Any Ideas?

Sorry, you're not making sense. For an application _re-write_ this could make sense. But one of the names that is NOT going away is "Konqueror", since it's already too much ingrained and there are already some websites detecting Konqueror's user-agent (instead of KHTML...), so we want to keep compatibility.

Finally, "he who does the work decides". If you write an application, you get to chose the name. Just as long as it is not offensive (which is quite subjective and always a hot topic).

Of course that is probably a reason. And of course it makes sense.
The Question I was askin is if you all like the Name?
Does Konqueror sounds good to you all?
Am I the only one that tae Name gives me a headake When I say or write it?
I was not ment to Flame. I am probably the Only one.

"But one of the names that is NOT going away is "Konqueror", since it's already too much ingrained and there are already some websites detecting Konqueror's user-agent (instead of KHTML...), so we want to keep compatibility."

My comment aboutrenaming several apps was too much, I understand, sometimes I type before I think. Still, what if many many people would want a rename, would you defy that? In the end it's up to the users I think, it's not like some people would like a rename just for the heck of it, there would have to be strong cases for it, I think there are. A rename might be an opportunity for KDE4. Just as with all the cool Plasma and Solid names. Changing Konqueror's name after KDE4 seems harder, but the confusion about it's name would likely only grow with a larger user base. It's a turn off name and ask anyone to write it down for you! Yes there are allot of problems related to a rename of Konqueror, but allot of opportunity as well I think. I keep rechecking how I spell Konqueror even after several years, the name just sucks IMO.

I, for one user, have no interest in seeing Konqueror renamed. To me, it's a good name that works well in the tradition of Navigator and Explorer. When you think about it, Opera, Firefox, etc., are equally strange, IF you sit and think about them that much. But mostly, it works. It's a good name, that has built up a good brand reputation, and it would be silly to give that up. All sorts of programs have weird names; it's not a problem.

Konqueror is actually very easy to pronounce in English (as far as such things go). It is pronounced just like the "real" English word "conqueror". See, they replaced the "C" with a "K", starting a naming tradition that we have yet to break.

Nowadays application developers get smarter about where to put the "K" though, like amaroK.

Konqueror is English as well as Firefox and kmail and I wouldn't attempt to pronounce these words German because they aren't. As for English: There was this bloke called William the Conqueror and he invaded Britain in 1066 and you can pronounce konqueror exactly like this name and it sounds really nice.

I know how to pronounce it. And yes I can speak English quite well.
And Firefox and kmail are nicer to say. It is not a matter of English or not English. Konqueror just stays a Crappy Name.
Look at al the Names Apple uses for there Products. Those are nice. I actually disgust this in a non geek group of people, and the majority found the Name awful as well.

Actually, Konqueror as a web browser is not very popular when looking at distrowatch statistics:http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.html
3% of all users, with of 29.5% using linux, means around 10% of linux users use konqueror (very similar to the 11% of the votes). Adding the few BSD does not change a lot the stats.

How many distros do propose Konqueror as web browser to the users. Mandriva, Suse are quite big distros, so it means when given a choice, most users do prefer Firefox to browse.

I still believe that we should promote Konqueror as the best true unified browser rather than trying to artificially split it into two applications.

But, to the point. The unfortunate fact is that Firefox is probably more popular due to the many seriously broken web sites our there. For whatever reason, Firefox appears to be better able to display such broken web sites.

For now, it appears that Kecko is the answer to this situation. Are we making any progress on this.

Note that I prefer Konqueror and only open Firefox when Konqueror fails to work on a broken web site. If Kecko was available, I could just switch from KHTML to Kecko when needed.

Another problem which could probably be fixed is that Konqueror sometimes fails to open Flash -- probably also due to broken HTML code.

> But, to the point. The unfortunate fact is that Firefox is
> probably more popular due to the many seriously broken web
> sites our there. For whatever reason, Firefox appears to be
> better able to display such broken web sites.

I use FF instead of Konqueror because of some excellent extensions and because I can use it on Windows and MacOSX too. I love crossplatform programs.

> For now, it appears that Kecko is the answer to this
> situation. Are we making any progress on this.

Safari on OSX has similar problems with broken websites. Even so it's the most popular browser on that OS.

I used to be a big fan of Firefox until I switched to a Linux desktop at work and home. I kept Firefox for roughly a month, but gave Konqueror a shot from time to time since it was integrated into KDE. I noticed that it was quite fast, where Firefox was not.

I've been a devoted user ever since. And in that context, I hope the rumours of a Konqueror for Windows come true, because I think Firefox could use some real free software competition.

> I use FF instead of Konqueror because of some excellent extensions and because I can use it on Windows and MacOSX too. I love crossplatform programs.

KDE has Konqueror
Mac has Safari

Does Windows have any version of KHTML at all? Put another way if a web designer is using windows is there an easy way to test against KHTML? Just compling with standards would be the ideal solution I know, but a windows version of KHTML would make it a whole lot easy do run a few quick tests to at least make sure the basics work.

"I still believe that we should promote Konqueror as the best true unified browser rather than trying to artificially split it into two applications."

That tac has failed. A web browser and a file manager are simply two different types of applications, albeit, with shared components (and that's where this flawed unified idea generally comes from). That is a much simpler and better solution to have - applications with shared components.

"A web browser and a file manager are simply two different types of applications"

Tell this to my mom who doesn't even know what a web browser or a file manager is. Actually, this is two different types of applications only for geek people who have been educated to use two different applications.

My mom does not even make a difference between what is on her computer and what is on the web. And I don't see the point to explain her because Konqueror is what she needs:

she clicks on a icon, she sees the content whatever the file type is;

she clicks on a link, she sees the next page whatever it is;

she put words in the URL bar, it launches a search on Google.

I don't want to explain her what a URL is. I don't want to tell her that she has to have a different window to display each document because it is quite hard for her to manage with different windows.

The true greatness of konqueror (and yes, I also think that it's a lot cooler/better/supercalifragilistiouser name than firefox) is that it unifies access to resources, local and remote. I've never understood what makes local and remote files so different that they need to be accessed with two different applications.

If konqueror would be split up to a web browser and a file manager, each part would end up duplicating functionality in the other, creating unnecessary confusion. For example, to which application does the functionality for ftp site browsing belong? Put it in either one and it is in the wrong place.

It would be interesting if it were possible to break those linux/bsd stats down between dedicated users and dual-booters. I suspect more dual-booters use Firefox due to cross platform convenience, and probably more dedicated KDE desktops use Konqueror.

This is not to say that apparently a sizable number of dedicated KDE users do not favour Firefox, but just that I suspect the ratios would be different.

It seems to me the main killer feature of Firefox, from people's comments, is easy to install extensions, more than its renderer/js implementation. For me the only extension that almost (but not quite) made me consider Firefox was adblock. Now that (finally!) Konqueror has a similar feature, Firefox (with it's hideous, hideous GTK based dialogs) is used even less.

Though as a developer I do use it a fair bit. Especially for the extremely convenient liveheaders extension, and the "web developer" extension. Also the Firefox/Seamonkey "Page Info" dialog is quite wonderfully detailed.

Still for 90% of my browsing... Konqueror, like KDE as a whole, just feels a whole lot better than the "competition" while being functionally equivalent. (And the tabs---without the need of extension enhancement---work better. KGet integration is handy at times.)

For the first time in 4 years, KOffice is starting to climb again. This is the result of the influx of serveral new developers in the last year and the increased development speed that brings. And this is DESPITE that OO.o released it's great new 2.0 this year with all the hype that generated.

Now, let's just finally get 1.5 out the door and start on the next new KOffice generation. Expect more to come here!

It looks like the superior desktop KDE is going to lose in the end against the inferior Gnome (I am not saying that gnome is bad). Red Hat and Ubuntu prefer Gnome and Suse/Novell seem to make the shift from KDE to Gnome as well. What a pity for KDE! does anyone know why KDE is losing acceptance by the big distros? Let's hope that Linux (with whichever desktop) is going to win the future ;-) My dream would be that Linux will beat Windows in the long term and both KDE and Gnome will coexist with 50% share each.

most redhat installs on desktops that i've seen use kde. Besides, redhat does not score that good in the award poll :o)

ubuntu can be running kde or gnome, you can't tell that from the figures on linuxquestions.org. But if you compare the 'best distribution' with 'best desktop', one can conclude that ubuntu-users mostly run KDE :)

SUSE switching to gnome? What gave you that idea?

KDE losing acceptance by the big distro's?
Redhat never accepted KDE, so nothing to loose over there.
Canonical made Kubuntu equal to Ubuntu, so that's a win for KDE
SUSE is still running KDE, en probably will continue to do so.
SUSE 10.1 will contain some interesting new/improved tools (kpowersave, knetworkmanager,kerry), all of them custom made for KDE.

the only major distribtion which is left is mandrake. kubuntu is second class compared to ubuntu. do you really believe that mark shuttleworth, a long time gnome user and contributor, suddently promotes kde? the reason behind it was (maybe still is) that novell (suse) stupidily decided to drop kde. as you know, they now promised to support kde as well (while gnome being the major desktop on the enterprise poducts).

linspire really isn't a major distribution, the distribution is just being sold by a few people (some who buy new computers).

on the long run, gnome seems to win (which isn't gnome's fault,rather being kde's which always wanted to be independent).